the Armchair Curmudgeon

Governance thru Hypocrisy:

Where to begin?

How about hypocrisy that extends upwards towards government.

Let me cite an example.

Ask yourself:  "Who were the funniest people in the world?"

If you are of a certain age and around in the sixties, it's likely you would have admitted it was

 the Pythons.   Five graduates of the elite schools of Britain....they all managed to find each other and gravitate into humor....and, in the process, change the constructs of humor and  the world.

If you are an old fan of humor going back to the sixties and remember their predecessors who influenced them most  it was "Beyond the Fringe" humorists Peter Cook and  Dudley Moore        and, later, "This Was the Week that Was!"  hosted by the unquenchable David Frost  who opened some new doors for the Pythons.... and nobody ever looked back.

The Pythons specialized in satirizing everything; nothing was sacred. They went beyond anything up to that point with their hysterical brand of humor....

Who can ever forget the fish slapping dance, the dead parrot, or the Spam, spam, spam sketch?

What is amazing to me is that they so perfectly fit each other, they are all cut from the same piece of cloth it seems.  This had to be  a group made in Heaven!

At some point in time, they decided to take on faith, and decided to address the birth of Christianity in their poke at extremist religiosity, not to poke fun at the faith, per se,  but the trappings of early Christianity and their view of the misperceptions of the people and their ideas.....

And that's the hook but it was not understood by the bigoted thin skinned extremist religious groups with no sense of humor who proved ready to assail them from every direction.

When the Life of Brian first previewed in New York, the pickets ran around the block.
Protestors carrying signs that read "Warner Bros was in league with the Devil!" they said and other words that critiqued the good natured ribbing of the Pythons and clearly did not understand that the Pythons were merely trying to provoke a laugh with a little harmless insanity.....

Even in London some critics crawled out of the woodwork to critique the Pythons describing a plethora of religious crimes they were guilty of..... "Hogwash!"  said most, who ignored their extremist views and simply laughed with the Pythons who marvelously pushed off their vacuous remarks.

Actually, ask most comics and they will admit the Life of Brian was perhaps the funniest film they had ever seen!....

Is raping and molesting young women a Christian approved action?   Is it okay to cheat employees out of their wages or to cheat on your taxes?.  What about setting up a profitable university that cheats the student of the education they expected to see--many investing their only savings in this bankrupt venture?  Is it moral, to have a foundation that only finances your own interests and gives nothing to charity which is fraud?   Yet, these are the actions of the man we promoted to lead our country into the future.  .    And yet his biggest block of supposedly firm religious extremists stays mum about his actions and his behavior....and buys into his perveresities and mythologies and is willing to overlook everything and give him a pass!....
 mythologies....

Now that was then.  We survived the Christian leaders who got a tax break for their purported immorality and contribution to the world Christianity has claimed to produce....

We don't aspire to being Doubting Thomas's but consider this : If we are so gung ho about protecting our Christianity, why have few if any leaders said anything about Trump's trashing of Christianity with his outrageous remarks, his contempt for Christian charity, and his commitment to dividing people up by color and spiritual belief.  Is this consistent with Christianity?.....   And why were Christians so upset by innocent humor and so indifferent about Trump's evident immorality?  I don't get it.  Frankly, I doubt whether he has ever opened a Christian bible; said a real prayer, believed in anything.  Instead he lives a life of perpetual anger and hostility against anything that doesn't support him 100%.  He has attacked people with physical ailments, veterans, heroes, and parents of military heroes?  Is that God's teaching?    He explains that caravans of Mexican murderers and rapists are coming here to take advantage of Whites.  He has also said in the riots in Charlottesville that there were fine people on those who caused the riots and the death.  That sounds more like a White Supremacist or a Neo-Nazi rather than a good Christian....

We are between a rock and a hard place.

  We take a hypocritical stance against a comedy group where spiritual Christians are taught that humor is destructive of their faith; yet, mind you, it's okay to practice immorality, unchristian attacks against people, and ridicule of those who serve their country and our great Christian spiritualists say nothing.   It seems to me a damned good definition of hypocrisy….. and reason to reconsider giving tax breaks to further hypocrisy.